Twisted Metal

Okay, I'm one of those people who plays games for story and cutscenes a lot, so I kind of loath the other twisted metal games aside from maybe 1, I like black, but I didn't care about the characters that much, dark and extreme doesn't necessarily mean good, but definitely a step in the right direction, and the others.... The goofiness is not... For me, sweet tooth wishing for all the sweetes in the world, wow, just wow. And that's just the beginning of how bad the stories get, but they always had pretty fun gameplay.

So naturally I was pretty interested in this, and this game has a soundtrack in my top 5, and one of the best stories in gaming, it's good it's real good. It's actually too good, let me explain, so focusing on three characters means they miles of development. Take Mr Grimm for exampl, fighting to save his father, and his young self from the pain that led him to kill, desperate for redemption. What does he do? He... Races. And fights weird mechs. Why?! It's too much to go back to that style, maybe it's just because I'm not a car person, but it's kind of hard to turn stories like this into a video game.

While sweet tooth is by far my favorite in this, dollface takes a close second, she may have a better origin, but every action she takes makes sense for her, and you can by her motivation of being pushed by extremely poor mental health and insecurity, but sweet tooth has better filmed cutscenes and voice acting.

Just saying, calypso looks like Adam sandler, I don't know if it's a pro or a con, so it's going here.

Now enough of how great that stuff is, and onto the flaws that bring it down. I don't like the gameplay, it's pretty smooth, but sometimes it's pretty bad. The races are IMPOSSIBLE. I had to bring a friend in just to beat them, as for the combat, it's hard to aim, and sometimes annoying, but still okay. As for the big flaws? THE BOSSES. I HATE THE BOSSES. No boss except for the first land, at all. The dollface mech makes no sense for character or story, and is boring. The best they could come up with to combat it, is to collect thugs, drag them to a truck, and turn them into remote missiles to launch them into the weak spots. This takes so long, even when your over the average level of experience with the game, it's just pure boring. But by far the worst boss has to be, the final boss, sweet tooths carnival of carnage. Again, it tried to be classic, with the impractical cartoonyness, so it doesn't make sense. YOU CANT HAVE THE STYLE AND REALISM OF THE CUTSCENES, AND THE CLASSIC GOOFYNESS. this boss is pure monotony. It's not hard, you die, but it's a good two to three hours you won't get back.

This game is okay, it's not worth playing really, if you like good stories, go watch the cutscenes on YouTube, if you like good music, go find the soundtrack desperately.

While this is one of my two most hated Twisted Metal games, it does deserve some credit. Basically, this game tried to reinvent the series after seven entries of the same-old, same-old. Sadly, the reinvention is based on online gameplay. The Story Mode only has three playable characters, but they make up for that by allowing the drivers to drive any car, which is a good change. And they use live-action/CGI for the cutscenes to tell the tale of those three, and yes, they are gruesome. In fact, they are the reason why this title is rated Mature when the developers were aiming for a Teen rating.

Sadly, while the cutscenes and the ability to have Sweet Tooth drive anything other than his iconic ice cream truck is good, everything else is bad. Once again, this game changes the controls, but unlike Twisted Metal 4, whose control changes were at least tolerable, Twisted Metal PS3 decides to basically throw the classic controls out the window and make it where Square accelerates and either pressing circle twice or using the right stick makes you go in reverse. I had a lot of trouble playing the game due to forgetting where accelerate is. Also, the D-Pad is restricted to using your energy attacks, which while I can understand why they did it, I wish they didn't make controlling your vehicle so hard.

Also, the story events do add some variety other than the destroy the competition to move on that past games have been known for. There's new variations like Electric Cage, which is basically stay in the cage to avoid losing grace, eventually losing health, and race matches, which are okay, but the checkpoint race in Dollface's story is a pain to beat even in the lowest difficulty.

Twisted Metal PS3 is more focused on online modes, and allows players to fight it out in modes like Team Deathmatch, and even Nuke Mode, which is basically Capture The Flag, only the team on offense captures opposing faction leaders to sacrifice to launchers that will fire missiles that need to be guided to a statue of the opposing faction, who will try and stop the attackers from completing their goal. Sadly, even that gets stale real quick, as it's hard to find a match with a lot of players, and the lack of DLC adding new vehicles and levels to play in also hurts the experience.

While Twisted Metal PS3 does an okay job in reinventing the series, the final results shows it needs some more work. If they ever do a sequel for the PS4, they should get rid of the races, fix the controls to be more like the original games or at the very least, less frustrating, add more than three characters to play as for Story Mode, and add DLC vehicles and levels if they plan to have online modes.